Aeropress Coffee Machine

(Trying out Flickr blogging)

From Alan Adler, the scientist, professor, engineer and inventor of the Aerobie... a coffee maker that claims to be the most efficient coffee maker ever. While I love the design, quite similar to a french press coffee maker, and the price ($30) is quite affordable, I wonder how efficient and useful this really is. They claim it takes less than 30 seconds to make a cup of coffee, but obviously that doesn't included the time and energy it takes to boil some water. So, while it may be much more efficient to use a traditional drip style coffee maker for any multi-cup brewing I'd still go for this over a french press for camping or such times when electricity is scarce, or I only need one cup of coffee. But honestly, when do you only need one cup of coffee. :)

Oh, Just as long as it comes in Lexan and not just glass that is.

Fancy gadgets. :)

Spotted on digg.com, original article at www.gizmag.com/go/5051/


On a side note, a little ranting on copyright.

Turn back now all ye' whom are faint of patience.

You've been warned... I wouldn't be me if I didn't bitch about copyright issues.

Consider this a liberated image. I hate gizmag.com's website, it sucks tremendously, way to much advertising and crap to the point of making it hard to read and navigate. I had to dig this image out of their website and download it to my HD in order to get it onto flickr and of course they put their crappy watermark on the image like they own it, but it's really just a promotional image from the manufacturer that they likely have no right to alter at all.

This sort of reminds me of the thinking of the so call broadcast treaty (aka. "the re-distributors copyright") big media lobbyists are trying to get pushed through congress. (Side note: I wish EFF would give a standardized name to... and initiate wikipedia articles on these things to make them more accessible. It's impossible to find and keep abreast of these issues.)

It's basic reblogging 101... Respect the original photographer or copy right owner. Just because you're redistributing something doesn't mean you own it. In fact I'd be willing to bet that while this image is specifically for this sort of promotional usage that altering the image is a violation of the original copyright owners granted usage rights.

Sadly, this sort of thing is standard practice these days among gadget blogs. Watermarking product images has become the new tyranny. I'm not against all watermarking, just stick to watermarking content you actually own rights to folks. :)

On a final positive note, at least we're talking about improper watermarking instead of the tyranny of digital rights management technologies. If certain powers get what they want I want have the luxury of bitching about having to liberate media, I'll have to bitch about not being able to liberate media, or at the very least spend much more time liberating it so i can reference it.

Most newspapers have learned a long time ago that they can't control who copies the text of their articles or images, and in fact 99.99% of all redistribution, copying and quoting of texts and images are very beneficial to them. Meanwhile blatant and habitual abusers are actually EASIER to identify and take legal action against... just read any old news article in the past year on plagiarism in education. Googling for suspected plagiarized phrases is about as easy as it gets. Images are a little trickier, but I guarantee you theft of images... nor articles is a business concern for online newspapers.

Yet here we are... hypocritically it's blogs like gizmag who are abusing copyright law and watermarking technologies by slapping their logos on ALL pictures wether they own them or not. Cheers to the great gadget blogs like Gizmodo and Engadget for doing a better job.